The basic idea is you create time for people who are experts in coding to work on coding problems. What has happened is this idea has collided with the open data and open government movement, and been loaded with expectations about public outreach and systematic transformation. Now (to exaggerate somewhat) hackathons are expected to:

produce commercial-quality smartphone apps in 48 hours

stimulate billions of dollars in economic activity

convince millions of schoolchildren to choose computer programming as a career

This is a lot to ask for out of an event structure that was originally a dozen people with laptops trying to fix a few bugs or to make a prototype of a web service that brokenly half-does something maybe interesting.

What are Hackathons For?

For a general public hackathon, they are mostly for fun, networking and awareness. They're not actually about coding. They're definitely not about making smartphone apps.

to raise awareness of the Ottawa River ecosystem, water quality and related issues

to connect e.g. the river science experts, river data experts, and coders, to make a few small things that may illuminate a few aspects of the river

to expose people to a different way of working together

to have fun

This is not the place to:

get free resources for the complicated app or website you've always wanted to build

solve river ecosystem issues

Basically, we have some new tools: data, code, the web. This is a way to bring those new tools to an existing problem and see if anything interesting emerges. For people who aren't familiar with the possibilities of these tools, the experience may change their perceptions of how we can use technology. For people who aren't used to open collaborative work, the experience may help them to reimagine some of their problem-solving.

Apps Contests

Apps contests are a good way to reward people for coding.

They're particularly good at rewarding coding if they connect to mentoring, internships, and investment opportunities.

Apps contests are not a good way to get apps. If you want apps, you should procure apps. If you use an apps contest you will get a one-off app that won't be updated and will probably eventually disappear.

Apps contest are an ok way to show the possibilities of bringing new technology to bear on a particular problem space. But they should be considered illustrative examples, not solutions.

All of which to say, there are many pieces that determine people's choices of career. Events that give a tiny sense of what coding is can maybe help a tiny bit, if they're well-structured enough that they aren't intimidating, exclusionary, and confusing.

But if you actually want people to code you need to build it into the curriculum, as both a separate track and an integrated tool. That is to say, you need to have both computer science courses and actually use the computer science skills in the other classes. And reward and recognize all along the way, not just wait for the students to emerge out of highschool with a few coding classes and expect them to want to continue clawing their way up to work at Google or become startup billionaires.

And it's way more than "coding" (which means everything and nothing, from writing a line of HTML to making some JavaScript to building an entire iPhone app). It's computational thinking, logic, problem-solving using technology. While it is WAY better to have kids come out of school with JavaScript skills than "teaching them computers" by training them in Microsoft Office, it's guaranteed that whatever language and approach the schools will codify will be obsolete by the time the students emerge. So it has to be both fundamentals and practical application.

It has to be education that prepares people to solve wicked problems.

Wicked Problems

Hackathons are not supposed to solve wicked problems. They're supposed to do very small things, with technology.

The good news is we have all kinds of other emerging approaches, some of them perhaps inspired by the hackathon ethos.

These are organisations made up of people who use innovative approaches to solve problems. Sometimes these approaches will include bringing new technologies to bear, sometimes not.

People solve problems, not events or technology.

Eventually, these organisations should demonstrate enough successful approaches that the overall system can be improved, with a combination of better education in school and better training on the job.

We don't want a world where all forms are fixed by a special Form Innovation Service. We want a world where everytime a form is created, the employee knows how to design it properly.

Wicked Problem Events

That being said, the way you construct an event is to first choose the right people, and then choose a variety of approaches. You might unconference, you might do ideas generation, you might do sticky notes and then all leave for several days (as suggested in Hearing Every Voice in the Room). We have lots of approaches that we can use now.

One of the underlying challenges is that hard problems are hard.

I see lots of events about e.g. IT infrastructure for science where you hear the same big problems over, and over, and over again.

Wicked Problem Spacetime

Ultimately, what you need is not one-off events, but trust, networks of collaborators and time.

The fact is that even to build a simple thing, you need lots of people working together. You can see this from the building of ORCid. Assigning a unique number to every researcher is not a conceptually or technically complicated thing. But making it happen took deep thinking about trust, governance and sustainability.

As another example, getting people in general and scientists specifically to use version control isn't a conceptually or technically difficult problem. But almost no one uses version control, even though it is foundational for many other layers of advanced things we can imagine. (And there is a related issue of whether people should need to "use" version control at all, or it should just happen automatically for them in their tools.)

We need to get better on the strategic side, to make sure we're solving the right problems, but the notion that we're particularly focused or "good" at doing tactical technical pieces I think is off-track. We're actually terrible at tactical technology.

So in response to

I think the focus on apps (to the detriment of research) is a by-product of our shortened shadow of the future, our culture of immediacy and the omnipresence of attention economy...

I would say yes, a focus on apps is misguided. But don't confuse delivering apps with delivering tactical technology. We could benefit from being a lot better at quickly delivering usable technology, in support of an overall strategy that addresses wicked problems. We need both a better short game and a better game plan.

August 11, 2014

On August 11, 2014 the White House announced the formation of a US Digital Service, as reported in the Washington Post

The White House on Monday announced that is was formally launching a new U.S. Digital Service and that they've hired to lead it Mikey Dickerson ...

U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel called it a "centralized, world-class capability...made up of our country’s brightest digital talent," forming a team that will be "charged with removing barriers to exceptional Government service delivery and remaking the digital experiences that citizens and businesses have with their Government."

The organisation will apparently be referred to as the USDS - I couldn't find a website yet. The Washington Post article points to a document on the CIO.gov site - U.S. Digital Services Playbook http://playbook.cio.gov/ that may give some ideas of the goals of the organisation. The article indicates the model will be for the service to be a centre of expertise on design and transformation of services for the digital environment.

June 02, 2014

There are good concepts developing about how to structure knowledge work, but they are completely unaligned with how we measure and plan for work and workplaces.

Knowledge work seems to benefit from a mix of focused effort and creative breaks. Ideally this means quiet spaces and large blocks of time for focus, with breaks taken in physical spaces that relax and provide opportunities for serendipity (the city outside the workplace, or an excellent cafeteria that draws employees). It also means minimizing interruptions during the focus period, which means minimizing online intrusions like email, as well as offline distractions like meetings and office "quick question" drop-bys.

Instead what we provide are cubicles, which are a kind of pseudo-private space that provide neither enclosed focus nor outreaching serendipity, Outlook-driven schedules of endless emails and meetings, and false-savings-driven workplace design that locates employees in isolated suburban campuses, with continuous-distraction "collaboration" environments where they have a table and a computer out in an open space, regardless of the work style or work type.

What the evidence supports:

Renewal: Employees who take a break every 90 minutes report a 30 percent higher level of focus than those who take no breaks or just one during the day.

Value: Feeling cared for by one’s supervisor

Focus

Purpose

People need to be able to move in and out of their focused work on their schedule, and in and out of their formal workspace on their schedule (this includes being able to leave their workplace and go outside).

We're trying to drive productivity with "time in chair", and to drive collaboration by taking away all walls. What we need to do is structure work around human physiology and psychology.

A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

1. Respect and hold the value of every person who works for you, because nothing matters more.2. Start measuring people by the value they create, not by the number of hours they work.3. Support, encourage and reward people for not responding constantly to email, and even for turning it off entirely at selected times, to get their most challenging and important work accomplished.4. Help people build more renewal into their lives, on and off the job. ... As just one example, encourage people to take a midafternoon walk or run outside, or a 15- to 25-minute nap wherever that’s possible5. Actively focus on making people’s jobs matter more.6. The way you behave every day makes a far stronger statement than anything you can ever say.

October 16, 2013

Canadian public servant Stephen Walker, Senior Director, Open Government and Information Management posts on the data.gov.uk blog:

This fall, the Government of Canada (GC) will release its Directive on Open Government, defining more clearly than ever before, the obligation that employees
have to deliver open data, open information, and open dialogue to
Canadians. In addition, our Blueprint 2020 initiative further challenges
employees to envision the future of the public service. In the UK, the
government has already started to address this need for culture change
in the 2012 Open Data White Paper: Unleashing the Potential.

By working together, we can strengthen our ability to find new ways
to harness the power of the public service. Our new public service needs
to be more creative and proactive in releasing data, and in building
relationships which optimize the use of that data. These relationships
help to bridge the transitional gap of cultural change that is needed to
spur opportunity for innovation, and to revamp how the government
provides high quality services to its citizens.

March 02, 2013

Some thoughts from the Canadian public service about Canada's national open data, specifically as delivered through the data.gc.ca portal

... a gigantic level of excitement around the potential for pan-Canadian federated open data. So the work that we do to drive interoperability between open data activities of British Columbia, or Edmonton, or the federal government, recognizing the fact that users and developers are going to want to combine and integrate data from multiple sources... that really gets us going. All of the possibilities around the... re-thinking around how we make an open data portal that does a lot more than the original open data portal (which was largely experimental at the beginning and was always a pilot), moving that idea forward, specifically around user engagement.

Those of you who have used data.gc.ca to date will know that it doesn't come with a lot of tools for user engagement. Our hope--coming out of events like this one today--is to help drive the design and delivery of that portal to maximize its functions in terms of engaging the users, or bringing users together with each other, in order to facilitate greater use, greater uptake of the open data.

And just from a third point... this idea that we are driven to deliver open data to developers to help with the development of apps--interesting, innovative ideas that will drive the kind of time efficiency that Ray mentioned earlier as well. But we do have to remember to think about the citizens. So the capacity for the platform or any government department or jurisdiction to ensure that the data serves the citizens (who may not be as technologically advanced) is also very important to us, and that gets us very excited about things like visualizations and interactive tools that will allow the citizens to see data in different ways that mean something to them.

To some extent this is just new terminology to describe an old concept - the skunkworks. The challenge has always been how to take these kinds of coherent, small, agile groups and integrate their work and their culture into the entire organisation - the problem of agility at scale. While we have great solutions for scaling websites from 1000 users to millions, we don't have great solutions for scaling organisations from a dozen employees to thousands while retaining innovation. It's the classic challenge of loft+coffeemachine versus aircraft carrier.

Can there be then a startup called government? San Francisco is trying to make it possible.

On their recently-launched site innovations.sfgov.org they list the thematic areas of their innovation portfolio:

StartupSF - to help businesses launch and connect with the community

EngageSF - using open data, ideas gathering platforms, and targeted hackathons to help citizens build on the city's information

SmartSF - using sensors, other urban technology, and discussions to build a smarter, more responsive city

I think there are common threads that run through these approaches, that help to move beyond the classic skunkworks - building in outreach from the outset, so that the small group is integrated both within the rest of the organisation as well as with the broader community outside.

Common Threads: A small, highly-visible, expert core team. A growing community / ecosystem around that core. Focused projects. Technology-enabled but not technology-dependent.

an online community - seems to be mostly to support the contests (they must approve your membership)

They state in their announcement blog post, in the text of the document that they posted to Scribd, that part of their mission is "encourager la réutilisation la plus large possible des données publique" - to encourage the greatest possible reuse of open data (my translation) - and that this mission includes connecting all the different actors in the innovation system through Dataconnexions.

These kinds of open data initatives show an understanding that simply providing the data is not enough - it requires active engagement with the community to build the innovation ecosystem that can maximize the benefits of releasing the data.

November 23, 2011

President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement spoke at PS Engage 2011, introducing new guidelines on social media and reiterating his enthusiasm for an innovative public service as part of an open government.

Collaboration

What does collaboration mean in the context of your work?

You can look at it any number of ways. But in order to have the greatest impact on an open and modern Public Service, collaboration must be about knowledge-sharing.

This means exchanging information, engaging in dialogue and working together. This is about enhancing our productivity which, in turn, makes Canada more competitive in the global economy.

Technology

Internet-based tools are allowing public servants to be more productive than ever, by sharing information and communicating with Canadians more effectively and efficiently than even a few years ago.

The potential for greater knowledge-sharing is there.

...

There is a tremendous opportunity now to take the tools of information technology and make government faster, more effective and more efficient. I believe the Public Service can enhance core government business such as program and service delivery, and even policy-making, with the right technology tools.

...

Let’s not underestimate technology’s profound effect on the workplace – in government and beyond.

Faster technology, a more connected world, wider networks and complex problems will make teamwork and collaboration required skills.

Public servants will have to be savvy in their efforts to modernize their workplace. A modern workplace can have a tremendous positive impact on the overall performance of the Public Service and on a renewed organizational culture.

Innovation

As President of the Treasury Board, I consider myself the minister responsible for championing innovation within government. I want you to help me achieve the goal of a Public Service of the future.

Open Government and Open Data

In Canada, Open Government is being pursued through three main streams:

Open Data, which is about offering government data in more useful and machine readable formats;

Open Information, which is about proactively releasing information to Canadians on an ongoing basis; and

Open Dialogue, which gives Canadians a greater chance to input into the work of government

As part of our leadership role in increasing transparency and accountability, Canada has signalled its intent to join the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Social Media

The Government encourages the use of new Web 2.0 tools and technologies such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These tools help create a more modern, open and collaborative workplace and lead to more "just-in-time" communications with the public.

Web 2.0 tools and services provide additional means of interactive communications. They are the modern-day equivalents of "town halls" and are being used for various purposes including recruitment, emergency communications, service delivery, stakeholder outreach and as tools for collaboration and consultation.

Access to technology and the Internet

Clement also said, although it is not reflected in the online notes, that it makes no sense for employees to have more access to technology and the web at the coffeeshop than at work. (My paraphrase was "makes no sense for employees to have more access to tech in the coffeshop than at work", @PSEngage paraphrased as "PS should not have better connectivity on their way to work than at the office".)

July 19, 2011

E-mail is not an optimal tool for many types of collaboration, but it is very difficult to get people to move away from using email. In fact it's difficult to get people to send less email and to stop checking their inbox every six seconds.

Two salient quotes from a recent >Globe and Mail article

“The real problem of e-mail is people, and people are not a solvable problem.” [quote from Merlin Mann of InboxZero.com]

---

In one 2001 study, [Thomas Jackson] found that employees reacted to 70 per cent of incoming e-mails within six seconds of their arrival. Dr. Jackson calls it “an addiction.” Problematically, it took them 64 seconds to recover their train of thought after the interruption, a dismal stat considering numerous e-mails flowed in every five minutes.

June 14, 2011

Angry Birds is a game in which small birds with different abilities topple structures (well, for the purposes of this metaphor, anyway).

An individual bird has a literal arc for a career, sometimes a long curve, sometimes a sharp peak, but always ending with a final impact. That impact may be a single wall destroyed, or it may be the final touch that causes an entire structure to collapse.

Each has different abilities - some have bursts of speed, some explode, some drop bombs, others simply smash through by brute force. Different combinations are needed to achieve the desired results.

We talk of smashing silos when we speak of IT project improvement or public service renewal. We talk of the Ivory Tower under assault

So can ask yourself a few questions: What kind of bird am I? What career arc do I want? At the end of my career, what final impact do I want to have, whether it's a single brick dislodged or silos toppling like dominoes?

Sidebar: After having thought of this idea (while bathing, although fortunately for everyone I did not run the streets shoulding Eureka! Angry Birds!) I was rather surprised and worried to see Angry Birds ... Understand Collaboration show up in my tweetstream from GovLoop the very same day. It actually turns out to be some specific collaboration lessons you can learn from Rovio, who have done various clever things to promote their game.

While LinkedIn can tell you the interconnectedness of my connections, it doesn't (yet) tell you how strong the connections are - although presumably this could be derived at least for online by analysing Twitter traffic, blog links etc. to see how often you @ message people, retweet them, link to their blog posts, comment on their blog posts... Then thicker lines could indicate stronger online connections (an interesting research project). And you might want to use brightness to indicate a fading over time of connections, if they are not maintained.

(I should mention before I launch into the rest of this that I am fairly stingy with my LinkedIn connections - in general it's limited to people I have worked with or communicated with extensively. I know some people use LinkedIn as an online rolodex of everyone they encounter in a work context, but I don't use it that way.)

In the absence of LinkedIn explaining the connections for me, here's my analysis: the story this tells is that I have three groups of LinkedIn connections: people from my workplace where I hold my substantive position, NRC-CISTI (green, lower left); people from elsewhere in the Government of Canada (blue, upper right); and a library / science / scholarly communication group (various orangey-purple colours, upper left). Most of the last group are not in Ottawa, and many are not even in Canada, instead being in the US, the UK and elsewhere.

What I think is interesting is the online and offline story this tells. In terms of maintaining social connections, when I'm working at CISTI, the green connections are maintained by face-to-face contact daily. The government contacts I see face-to-face weekly, mostly at after-hours events related to social media, collaboration and public service renewal. And the scholarly comms / library connections I see usually at most once or twice a year, at conferences.

So in an interpersonal sense, the lines to workplace colleagues would be very thick. But if you were to be able to apply an "awareness of work activities and interests" filter, the picture actually changes dramatically. In that case, the connections are strongest, the amount of information transferred largest, for people with a sustained online presence. Communication within an organisation is a classic problem. But it's interesting that it now is possible in some cases for me to have a much better understanding of what is happening outside my organisation, what people are working on and investigating, than to understand what's happening internally.

Twitter in this case can be thought of as a vibration of the connection, a continuous thrumming of quick notes of activity - a thought shared, a link retweeted. In network terms we would call this a "keep alive", a ping. "I'm here, I'm working on things," Twitter says. But for real information density, you need to have blog posts - a blog post is a thick solid line, a rich informational link, particularly if it has a lot of out-links and comments. And of course, this starts to look like synapses - frequently used connections get stronger.

This can lead to an odd dichotomy, where your social connections at work, which traditionally would have been the richest sources of information about what's going on, may actually serve only a tribal purpose, whereas "virtual" connections link you much more strongly into the information you need to do you work, and provide a sense of ambient awareness about important developments in your fields of interest.

The change - the fact that when people narrate their work, regardless of where they are, you can understand better what is going on - this change I think is part of what drives the gap in understanding, between the people who say they must be connected in order to do their work, and the people who see online activities are purely social, the "why do employees need Facebook" question. This is a result of a confusion between networking for social connections, and networking for information connections.

I also think people apply an odd scepticism to these online connections, as if they're somehow not "real", as if only face-to-face is real interaction. To which I say, is calling someone to tell them you love them not "real" because you're not both in the same physical space? Is writing someone a heart-felt handwritten letter of thanks not "real"? It's a very odd concept of real if that's the case.

All this to say, we have to be careful about analogies from the physical world to the digital world. People hear the "social" in social media and think employees are going into purely entertaining spaces, to take a break. Whereas what has actually emerged for some is a professional knowledge network that gives them more information and more context more rapidly from external sources than is available within their own organisation.

So be aware: if your organisation is a tight cluster of interconnections, with few links reaching outside the organisation, and with very thin amounts of information exchanged across the connections, you're going to be outperformed both by employees within your organisation who are better at making professional connections online and contributing to the online ecosystem of information, as well as by organisations that as a whole are able to learn this communications lesson.

If you want a classic example of an organisation failure in this area, there's no better one than the organisation intranet, an inward facing mirror that reflects only your own images and ideas back at you, typically outdated ones frozen in the web of intranet approvals and process. There's a reason it's called the World Wide Web, not the organisation internal network. The power came with open worldwide connections, not with organisations talking to themselves. Open allows serendipitous connections, unanticipated discoveries. Choose open.

October 17, 2010

I had written some notes for the panel I was on at Collaborative Culture Camp, but a panel is not like a speech - I respond to the questioning of the moderator (the able Nick Charney, in this case) and the audience. In a panel, I can mainly just hit a few key points related to the questions.

I will use my notes to inform some blog postings.

One of the points that I think is important is to step back from either looking at this as specific technologies (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) or in generational terms. Technologies come and go. Most of the ones that are getting attention are so new (less than 5 years old) that it's hard to truly understand them yet. Generations are much more complex than some simple box we might want to put them in. Also generations are better understood in retrospect, rather than trying to analyse them in the moment. But there are some long-term, fundamental changes that are driving the interest in technology-enabled collaboration. While there was a statement in the opening panel that we could have met to discuss the challenges of collaboration within the government at any time in the last 40 years, there are some differences informing the 2010 conversation.

I talked about these in a presentation I gave in 2007, as part of the context underpinning Service-Oriented Architecture for Libraries. I believe there are key elements that have impacted libraries (and other organisations where "information is power" has to be reconsidered in a world that now seems to be awash in information):

* Digital

The shockwaves of the transition to digital have been reverberating through our economic and political systems for well over a decade. Digital has some fundamental "laws" that break the way we understand the world; digital environments, bits, behave differently than atoms in our physical, analog world.

Most importantly, there is a law of the digital world that is as fundamental as gravity in the physical world: in the digital environment, There Are Many Copies. That is, you cannot stop copying of digital objects. You could go as far as to say digital objects "want" to be copied, it is natural for them to be duplicated.

When this Digital Law came into collision with the laws based on our physical world, it led to some nonsensical results. Basically, existing cultural enterprises require your systems to lie to you, to pretend that their bits can't be copied, in an attempt to patch the Code that is Law in the digital environment (this terminology is a play on Lessig's book Code is Law - which is now being revised in a wiki).

The digital bits that live in e-books or iTunes TV shows or movie DVDs are quite capable of being copied, but for the convenience of a legal system based on the idea that copying is hard, your e-book reader, your iPod, and your DVD device are all required to tell you a lie, to pretend that their bits can't be copied. Huge commercial forces are at work attempting to maintain this lie and, not surprisingly, they are unable to defy gravity - bits quite happily get copied in defiance of their will.

Great work is being done to bring the legal system into alignment with the reality of the digital world, most notably through Creative Commons, where you retain rights while accepting that your work can be easily copied.

For libraries as temples of books, or for other organisations where processes and people operated on the reality that analog information was hard to copy and hard to circulate, this has been a major change, and one that is still poorly understood and accepted.

And we need to recognize that we even accept this lie to some extent ourselves in our social media interactions, pretending that Facebook postings, Twitter Direct Messages and emails are somehow "private", when all that means is that their easily-copyable bits, sitting on a disk somewhere, just have a flag associated that says "please don't copy this without permission".

UPDATE: But I no longer think that the framing of generational differences is a useful one. Four years on, setting generational language aside, I do still hold to my statement (where you can replace "library" with e.g. "managerial")

I suggest you start delegating to those with technical knowledge when appropriate, start communicating what it is you want, and start working to integrate the technical and library teams, rather than dividing them.

My four-year-old statements are a reminder of how easy it is to frame this as a conflict of generations, rather than my current perception that it is a conflict based on management styles and openness to change. In fact I think framing it as old-vs-young immediately puts up a huge barrier, as you draw the line across the page between "them" and "us".

ENDUPDATE

* Internet

In an alternate world, we might have had digital, without the Internet. That is, easily copyable local digital content, but no easy way to move it around.

That is not the world we have. We have a network with global reach. This is a profound transformation of the relationship of the individual to their environment. Any individual can now reach a huge world-wide audience. It's hard to even think at this scale, to imagine your words being read at different times in different places, reaching far beyond the constraints of your neighbourhood, your job, or your social position to anyone in the world with a network connection and interest in your ideas.

It also means that information can circulate, documents, images, reports - endlessly copied and linked to, around and around the network. This ability for an item of content, or an individual, to immediately reach a global audience is transformatory. Again, it challenges our assumptions that were based on the limits of speed and reach that were imposed by the physical limits of the analog world.

* Discovery

We can also imagine an alternate 21st Century where Yahoo succeeded and Google never came into being. Yahoo was a classic information management approach, a library-type approach to managing a sudden huge amount of accessible content. Humans went through pages and manually categorized them, manually building a clickable directory of "recommended" links. The directory still lives on, although in our real 21st Century where Google won, it has faded from prominence http://ca.dir.yahoo.com/

Yahoo, like any other "gateway" site, now places search front and centre, because Google won.

Without Google, which has only been with us for a bit more than a decade, bits still would have been copied, and information still would have been available worldwide, but it would have been very difficult for individual uncoordinated contributions (blogs, tweets, photos) to be discovered. The lack of scalability for both human categorizers as well as for web surfers, trying to remember good sites, would have meant (and did mean, in the Yahoo era) that as in the physical world, a few major outlets of information dominated, simply because it was incredibly labourious to try to browse your way to new relevant sources of content.

Google's relevant search results, which don't care if you're famous, which may rank a lone blogger above a major news outlet, forever altered the balance of power. Now not only could your content be copied and accessed anywhere in the world, it could be found based on interest, not on how large a media organisation you had or how well-recognised your brand was. People could come to you, outside of a container of a work domain or a newspaper, and find your ideas. People could land in the middle of your carefully-designed website, far outside the navigation flow you had imagined.

This also broke a lot of physical world assumptions. It was easy, in the world where you browsed to sites through Yahoo, to imagine people guided in the "front door" (main page) of your site, and then walked through the content according to the categories and process you specified. Many library sites were (and still are) designed based on this model. It was hard for people to understand that in a Google world, people would land directly on a page with the information they wanted, and they would evaluate it based on the immediate utility to them, not on its associated site container.

Now anyone could be discovered, and those who were better at creating content could rise to prominence without any mediating institutions. This is a dramatic shift from a world where you could call in media to view your prepared news release. Now anyone can be a reporter, and anyone can share something that gets discovered and reported upon.

This turns hierarchies upside-down and inside-out. In the government bureaucracy, you can pretend that every classification, e.g. Computer Science Level 3 (CS-3) is an interchangeable, invisible part of the machinery of government. In the world of Google, every one of those employees can have a significant Internet presence, and based on their expertise and ability to commuicate, may have more visibility (and more associated opportunities) than their senior managers.

As well, in a world of discovery, rather than trying incredibly elaborate schemes to seek out partnerships and find collaborators, you can just share what you are doing online, and partners will discover you. Discovery means that simply by talking about what you are doing, people with similar interests can find you and communities can form.

This is a very different model from formal meetings where people at the exact same level meet with others at the exact same level and circulate information only between themselves.

* Exponential

The network is a community-forming machine. This happens seemingly automatically, as an inherent aspect of the technology. Long before the web we had bulletin board systems (BBSes) where people joined forums according to interest, and once email came into being we started to have mailing lists of like-minded individuals. Then came USENET, all based on basic technology, plain text on the screen, but a powerful tool for sharing with people who were interested in the same sub-sub-sub-topic. These technologies haven't disappeared - there are still active communities discussing geneology and every other topic under the sun, just using email.

But, in our last counter-factual, it might have been that we never got beyond basic PCs, green lines on a screen, slow connections, 1 megabyte floppy drives, 30 MB hard drives - it was not a given that technology had to change by leaps and bounds. We still would have been connected, but the richness, complexity and speed would have been limited.

However, in our actual digital world, technology did follow Moore's Law. My first computer, a VIC-20, circa 1981, had 5 kilobytes (5000 bytes) of RAM, and an 8-bit processor, with a clock speed of 1 Megahertz, and some tiny amount of external storage. My latest computer has 9 thousand million bytes of RAM (9GB), and four 64-bit processors running at 2,600 Megahertz with one million million (or one thousand billion, or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes) of storage (1TB).

Fibre can push around Gigabits, which is a long way from 300 baud modems.

These changes happen year over year, which makes it hard for us to appreciate them, but they are dramatic. A nice diagram shows that a 2010 iPhone is as much or more computer than a 2000 iMac.

Putting it all together

This is a major transformation. When we put the picture together - digital content that is impossible to prevent from being copied, a global network, content indexed in near-real-time that can be discovered based on keywords and relevance, and compute, storage, and network capacity that has grown exponentially, we are living in a dramatically different world.

Technologies and generational quirks may come and go, but these fundamental changes are not going away. We must adapt to deal with the reality of these changes, and that means both tremendous new opportunities for effective collaboration, as well as enormous disruptions for existing processes and systems.

This is the challenge we face, that drives the need for a new understanding of collaboration enabled by technology, within the government as well as between the government and the rest of our connected world.

October 16, 2010

On Friday October 15, 2010 I attended an event at Library and Archives Canada called Collaborative Culture Camp. I had provided a tiny initial spark of an idea that thanks to an exceptional group of public servants (and some not even currently employed in the public service) turned into a roaring fire. I think it really demonstrated "the art of the possible" when it comes to putting a government event together.

Right now in the Government of Canada we're in an interesting situation where we're using a mix of purely internal tools (such as our government-wide wiki, GCPEDIA) as well as public tools (like Twitter and Google Docs) for various types of collaboration and sharing. The event was extensively tweeted (an "amplified conference" to use the terminology originated by Lorcan Dempsey and favoured by Brian Kelly).

I know of three Twitter archives for the event. There were roughly 1600 tweets during the daylong event, which had about 200 attendees.

Overall it was an inspiring event, further enhanced by the keynote from Wayne Wouters, the Clerk of the Privy Council, who in his role as head of the public service spoke about the need for increased collaboration across government and the use of modern tools to support our work. (He even tweets, in part just to demonstrate to the rest of government that it's ok to do so: @WayneWouters - although he did warn that he mainly uses it to draw attention to the accomplishments of the public service or individual public servants.)

I will have more to say in future postings about the event and the panel I was on.

UPDATE: Here's some background information on the event, including the poster that was made for it and a link to the (Government of Canada internal only) GCPEDIA page about it - Event: Collaborative Culture Camp by Nick Charney (@nickcharney)